ABSTRACT
Many years, economics has been about so-called agents. These agents have almost nothing to do with real ordinary people who are everywhere in the world. The main goal of the economic actor is, according to classical economy, very simple – to maximize needs of the actor, i.e. the needs of people must be satisfied to the maximum. This is usually done using the tool called utility. Utility is subjective feeling of satisfaction resulting from consumption of goods or services. Utility can be categorized as ordinal or cardinal, however, what is more important is the fact that a consumer is able to order goods according to their utility from the consumer’s point of view. In addition to this, in case of cardinal approach of utility, the consumer is able to quantify these utilities using the utility function. The utility function is a way for assigning certain number to every possible consumption basket (combination of goods) so that more higher number would be assigned to preferable consumption baskets (Staníková 2015). Using the utility function, total utility resulting from the consumption of certain goods, can be calculated. The total utility is defined as the total satisfaction from consumption of selected goods. It is obvious that the total utility is dependent on the number of consumed goods, their properties, qualities as well as the consumer’s preferences. We can also define the marginal utility which is defined as additional utility resulting from the additional consumption of goods or services (In economics, the partial derivatives are used for calculating the marginal utility).
